


ere the bees

by Ellipsical



Series: Oh! how I love [7]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blow Jobs, Depression, Erectile Dysfunction, Existential Crises, Harold Stackhurst Please Go Home!, M/M, Medicinal Side-effects, Self-Esteem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:34:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22134109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellipsical/pseuds/Ellipsical
Summary: Title taken from John Keats' poem, Endymion, Book One:And, as the yearGrows lush in juicy stalks, I'll smoothly steerMy little boat, for many quiet hours,With streams that deepen freshly into bowers.Many and many a verse I hope to write,Before the daisies, vermeil rimm'd and white,Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the beesHum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: Oh! how I love [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/679118
Comments: 26
Kudos: 68





	ere the bees

“Sherlock.”

“Hmm?”

“What are you reading?”

I looked up from the page to meet a uniquely quizzical look on John’s face.

I have previously expounded on the glory of John Watson in the morning, just after he’s woken up and is so sweetly disheveled and delightfully unkempt, but have I yet told you of John Watson in the afternoon? An effulgent afternoon in early spring no less, when the light is diaphanous and delicate as spider silk upon his silvered hair? And the grass beneath him run riot with clover and violets and a dark, dew-drenched emerald in hue? And what of the blue stretch of sky above us, the same scalding blue that smoulders in John’s eyes? John Watson on a Monday afternoon in Sussex is indeed a many splendoured thing to behold.

“Cattulus,” I answered, laying the book down on our tattered patchwork picnic blanket which smelled faintly of camphor and pine to better take in the salient details of his line of inquiry:

Brow furrowed, but the corner of his mouth crooked up; bemused. A soft, fond look in his eyes. It spreads through me warm as sunshine that look, like whisky or brandy, like honeyed tea.

A breeze rolls in off the coast in the distance, ruffling the grass on the hillside and John’s gold and sterling fringe with its fingers. It is fragrant with the scent of apple blossoms, creamy and lemony bright. I breathe it greedily.

“Brushing up on your Latin?” John asks, glancing down at the open book beneath my palm.

I hum, my gaze flickering lower, taking in the springy hairs on his chest, just peeking out of his shirt, unbuttoned to his sternum. The mischievous work, I admit, of myself, as we leant into the doorway on our way out and, helpless as ever to his charms, caught him up in a kiss. His hands were full, you see, and there was a bit of blackberry jam caught in the stubble around his mouth and he was smiling at me, well, giggling really, about some inane village high jinx, and well, do I need a reason to kiss my husband beyond the fact that he was there, ripe for the kissing, and brimming with laughter and that I love him rather desperately? I think not.

I wanted to kiss him just now, him propped up against my body as I lay on my side, his broad back nestled against my thighs, tucked into the crook of my waist, his legs stretched out in front of him with his feet bare against the cool grass. 

“Why?” I ask, somehow resisting the urge to feel his mouth under mine, “do you know Latin?”

John shakes his head. Drags his tongue across the pink pink seam of his lips. Wet. “It’s just.” Smiling. The wind returns to rifle through his fringe once more, sweeping it over his forehead a bit. Making him look a bit boyish, a bit rakish, and more than a bit delicious. I watch, rapt, as John drops his hand down between us. “There’s a bit of rather friendly nudging going on over here.” Murmured low, and oh, look at how his eyes grow dark. My heart skips a bit as John’s hand trails over the—yes, he’s right, I am half hard—slight bulge in the front of my trousers.

“What does old Catullus have to say that’s so interesting, hmm?” John brushes his fingertips over the head of my just swelling cock. _God_. “Something fascinating no doubt. Something about…let me guess. Science? No. Ash?” He snaps his fingers, face animated with his teasing. “Oh, I’ve got it. The preservation of dung beetles under glass.”

I am grateful every day for John Watson and today is no different. I am especially grateful he is mine and that his Monday afternoons are for me and me alone. I’m a possessive devil, as you have probably come to know over the course of these missives, and selfish to boot. I refuse to share him. But that does not mean that I take even one moment for granted. I am grateful for his good natured ribbing about Latin and dung beetles, for the prick of his stubble under my tongue as I taste the tart sweetness of blackberries on his skin, even the way he uses up all the hot water in the tank to take long soaks in the bath or the way he botches up the crossword each week.

I am grateful for the way my toes still curl in my shoes when he kisses me, the way he jots down notes on random bits of flotsam he finds at hand, bits for his stories which end up in maddening piles on his desk, the way he puts up with my moods and my prolonged periods of melancholy, the way he will pause almost anything (except for his writing) to nap with me. I am grateful for the way he accepts me and only asks for reform when my behaviour is beyond the pale or is harming him or myself or others in some way that is beyond my ken.

I’m grateful, for instance, that I can reach out and caress the back of John Watson’s hand as he lightly fingers the line of my cock and say, with full certainty of the reaction it is going to get, “No. It was face-fucking, in fact,” and watch as his mouth drops open and his eyes sharpen and blacken simultaneously and his cheeks grow red, and, I know from experience, would feel hot if I reached out and pressed my fingertips there.

“Is that right?” John said, desire roughing up the edges of his words. “I didn’t give Catullus enough credit, then.”

“No, I think not,” I manage, somehow, to say, as his sprightly fingers made short work of the buttons on my jeans.

“Oh,” the sound a reverent exhalation as John took me out into the sylvan spring air. His palm was hot against my skin and I shivered a little at the shocking heat of his touch. We both looked down at where he grasped me, wondering at the sight.

It had been some time, you see, since I had been able to manage a spontaneous erection at midday on a Monday, or really any other day of the week for that matter.

I had had an extra prolonged bout of melancholy at the end of November that had been some cause for alarm and I had been put back on anti-depressants post-haste, which in turn had muffled my sex drive to almost nothing.

So while the kisses has been manifold and plenty, the actual act of lovemaking had been sparse and few between. It was therefore a rare treasure for my cock to be hard of its own accord and filling John’s hand prodigiously and neither of us wanted to waste it. Offering up a silent prayer of thanks to Catullus I lowered myself onto my back, letting my legs fall open as John urged my jeans down over my thighs.

I had almost forgotten the sharpness of pleasure, how bliss can slice through you like the supple flesh of a plum, laying you open to the core.

It cut through the fog that normally swamped me, battling the intentional numbness that the medication caused.

Who knew what miracle window had opened to allow me this moment, but I was telling you before that I am given to gratitude and grateful I was for the blade of arousal slitting through me.

It hurt, in a wonderful way.

In a primal, wild, wonderful way.

Like teeth, it bit me.

Like flame, it singed me.

There are so many ways to sunder.

And I did nothing but offer myself up to it, baring myself to it, surrendering to the whetted sluice of it.

It was outsized, the feeling that tore through me when compared to the ginger tenderness with which John used his mouth on me. He coddled and cradled me, so careful, the gift between his lips properly cherished. But I did not want cherishing. I wanted ravaging. I thrashed a bit, my fingers tangled up in the quilt, bunching it and smoothing it, my body trembling.

“Sherlock.” He lifted his head, lips parted and shining, slightly swollen from where he had been sucking me. “What is it? What do you want?”

“I—“

“Hello!”

“No.” I could not believe it. “No!” It could not be real.

John pushed up onto his knees, the very picture of debauchery, his hair standing on end, his cock straining hard against his flies, his shirt undone and listing off one shoulder to reveal a peaked nipple.

“Hello!” Came the call again and I groaned, throwing my arm over my eyes.

“Harold fucking Stackhurst.” John growled under his breath, having the presence of mind to do up my buttons before he began to put himself to rights.

“I will murder him one of these days,” I pledged darkly, rolling over onto my stomach and burying my face in my folded arms, my cock trapped against the cold hard ground.

“Oh, there you are,” Harold blasted Stackhurst said, cresting our driveway, his hand raised in greeting. John, bless him, went to meet him.

Harold Stackhurst had a crush on my John and he turned up at all hours seeking the warmth of his presence. You cannot fault a plant for the need of the sun, I knew this better than any, but I cursed him still. What invented excuse would he have this time, I wondered miserably, lamenting the lost moment of opportunity that presented itself so infrequently.

It was a case as it turned out. John came to crouch beside me and relayed the facts quietly: a man found dead stuffed inside a steamer trunk.

Boring.

But along I went, morose and resigned. It was quite a simple case, solved within hours, and concluded in a tremendously satisfying shoot-out that saw Harold Stackhurst grazed by a bullet, which caused him to make a rather undignified, snivelling show of it in front of John. It was enough to make you believe in karma.

Or it would have been if John, in his tiresome integrity and doctorly fashion, hadn’t dragged Harold bloody Stackhurst home to have his wound seen to.

And so the evening found me leaning against the kitchen counter as a shirtless Harold Stackhurst, who obviously saw the inside of a gym quite regularly, sat before my John, who disinfected and stitched up the man’s arm with his usual efficiency. I loomed over the procedure to remind my irritating weed of a neighbour just who that particular sun belonged to. The frequent sidelong looks that lingered on me throughout satisfied me that the point was taken. 

Before John could offer the man tea or supper I complained of a migraine, held up Stackhurst’s jacket for him to slip on, and saw him out the back door and on his way.

When I stepped back inside the kitchen John was at the sink drinking a glass of water. He was still in his coat, one hand inside his pocket, and looked tired. I went to him, drawn as any simple bloom is to its life-giving star, and slipped my hand inside his pocket to thread my fingers up with his. He turned towards me, leaning his weight into me, smiling as we fingered the present I had secreted there earlier in the day.

“What is it?” he asked, his body warm and familiar against mine.

“Guess.”

“It is a box,” he said, stating the obvious. He smelled of the outdoors and the faint scent of gun smoke residue clung about his coat.

“Quite right. Clever of you to have puzzled that out.”

“Shut up,” he said, squeezing my hand before he untangled it and drew the small tin out. He held it up, clearly bamboozled by it.

“You bought me mints?” he asked, incredulous. “How…romantic.”

“In fact I did not buy you mints. What do you take me for? Really John, my pride is wounded.” I pressed a hand over my heart. “What else could be inside?”

“Could it be a muzzle?” John grumbled, beginning to glower at me a bit.

“For me or for Toby?” I heard Toby shift on his dog bed in the corner, attuned to the sound of his name.

“Shall I just open it then?” He was short tempered. It had been a long day. I relented and inclined my head.

“You didn’t buy me mints, you bought me one single mint?” John said, his voice tending more towards outraged than incredulous now.

Sighing I flipped the tin over and caught the blue pill in my palm, showing John the _Pfizer_ etched into the other side.

He stared at it for a moment and then shook his head wearily.

“No.” And with that he was shrugging off his coat, hanging it on its peg, toeing off his shoes, stooping to pet the dog, and then walking out of the kitchen, ignoring me all the while.

I listened to him make his way up the stairs and into our bedroom. The pipes moaned in the walls heralding the start of one of John’s baths.

I puzzled at his reaction for a moment. I had miscalculated, that much was clear, but…how?

Eventually the pipes quieted and with John safely ensconced in the tub I too hung up my coat, removed my shoes, gave Toby a rub behind his ears, and then climbed the stairs to perch on the toilet seat, the pill still clutched in my hand.

John’s bubble bath was eucalyptus and spearmint scented and the small space was filled with the spiky sweet smell that prickled the inside of my nose. It was an intriguing scent and one that made my senses perk up, bringing me right to the edge of arousal. I liked burying my face in John’s neck after he had soaked in it. It was masculine somehow, and assertive. It made me want to remove all my clothes.

“I bollocksed it up,” I said ruefully. “I wish you’d tell me why.”

“It makes you ill,” John said simply, his eyes closed and the lines of his face relaxed.

“It makes me…” I trailed off, trying to remember. I’d taken Viagra once before. On John’s birthday? It was ages ago, the last time I had been on medication for depression. We had gone away somewhere…Edinburgh perhaps? I had wanted us to make love. And we had, a rather spectacular three times if I remember correctly.

“You had mild flu-like symptoms all the next day,” John went on, his voice soft and measured and peaceful. He wasn’t angry at least. “Stuffy nose, headache, diarrhoea on the train home, remember? You hardly left the loo.”

I shuddered, the memory finally clarifying in my mind.

“Its not worth it. I know its unfair that Stackhurst interrupted us today, but I don’t want you to be sick tomorrow just so that we can have sex tonight.”

“That’s very noble of you, John, however might you consider that I’d like to have sex with you, perhaps? That I’d like to be intimate with my husband even if he’d rather spend time tending to the muscled nuisance of a neighbour while his sexually defunct partner withers away in the background? Is that so surprising? That I’d want my husband to remember why he ever bothered with me in the first place?”

John sat up with a splash. I watched, warily, as his face underwent a series of thunderous progressions. He opened his mouth three times to speak, but stopped himself each time.

“You are spoiling for a fight and I will not give it to you,” he said at last, sinking back down into the water and closing his eyes resolutely against me.

I stalked out, closing the door with a bang behind me. Toby, who had followed me upstairs, leapt down from our bed and slunk out of the room, eyeing me circumspectly. I paced. He was right, damn him, but god it was frustrating, no, it was infuriating! If I stopped taking the anti-depressants then I risked losing him to unpredictable mood swings and if I kept taking them I risked losing him to low libido and erectile dysfunction. My body was defective and I wished, nonsensically, that I could trade it in for a new one.

“Don’t be an idiot,” John called from the bathroom, interrupting my line of thought succinctly. “Stop ruminating and put on your pyjamas. I want to go to bed when I get out.”

In a fit of pique and pettiness I swallowed the pill.

I stripped off my clothes and got into bed, fuming silently as I lay beneath the covers. Diarrhoea be damned, I wouldn’t be treated like a child.

It was a half an hour later that I finally heard the plug lifted and the drain begin to suck the water down to set the pipes groaning once more. My temper had cooled somewhat and I had come around to the conclusion that I was an idiot and that I would pay for taking the pill, just as John had said I would, but also that I needed and wanted to have sex all the same.

I just hoped he was amenable.

“Christ,” he sighed as he came through the bathroom door with a towel wrapped around his waist and found me lying on my side naked. “You took it, didn’t you?” Hands on his hips, stern and disappointed and mildly exasperated, but not surprised. I think I’ve mentioned but he was very cute when he was cross with me. “You’re impossible, you know that, don’t you?” he said, going back into the bathroom.

“John!” I called out, the vulnerability making me slightly nauseous. What if he said no? What if I was just too much? What if he did prefer the attentions of Harold Stackhurst, that moronic Adonis? My gut twisted itself into a knot.

“Pipe down,” John said, appearing once more in the doorway and turning off the light. The towel was hung to dry in its place and he padded into the bedroom naked as me, which was now lit with only the rich golden glow of my bedside lamp. It cast his shadow onto the wall behind him as he climbed into bed to lie beside me on his side, facing me.

“I want only to make you happy,” I said, marvelling at my inadequacy in accomplishing that one simple task, “and yet I make a very poor job of it, I’m afraid.”

“And what would make you happy, Sherlock? To be in the loo all morning tomorrow and feeling positively wretched all day? I only want the same, you know, and I can’t imagine the side effects would accomplish it.”

“It’s been months,” I said, trying to make him understand and feeling like there was a fundamental disconnect between the ways we were communicating. “I want to be close to you, in that way. I want to make you feel good.”

“Darling, you do. Just last week you had me over the kitchen table and I came all over your experiment, remember?”

“I had you over the table with a dildo, John,” I pointed out.

“And? It was a fantastic shag. You don’t have to worry about keeping me satisfied. You don’t have to put yourself through hell.”

“ _I_ want it, ok!” I blurted out, my cheeks pounding with a sudden rush of blood, my frustration boiling over. “I want to you to fuck me, all right? I want to _feel_ it. I miss feeling it, feeling alive, feeling the way you make me feel when you’re touching me. I love making you come, even when I can’t, but _I_ want to feel it tonight. _I_ want to come with you and _I_ want to be fucked and—“

“Ok, ok,” John said, sliding across the mattress to put his hands on me, to soothe me and quiet me and kiss my brow and gather me close. “I get it, I’m sorry. I’m thick, I’m sorry I didn’t get it before. I get it. I understand.”

I lay there drained. The last thing I felt was sexy. I felt small and whiny, unaccustomed to sharing such a bald need.

But John’s body works a very simple magic on me and I allowed myself to flow into him and under its spell.

John kissed me, slid his mouth over mine and I opened to him.

He whispered words to me as he ran his mouth over my throat and the arch of my collarbones and for long moments I wrestled with the incongruence between how I saw myself and how he saw me. He touched me as if I was something precious, not broken. Or precious in spite of being broken, I’m not sure. The spell he worked spooled through me, a bright satin ribbon of feeling, a feeling of comfort, of safety, of being well loved, and it quieted the doubt that wanted to refute his reality. What if, I thought, I could see myself as he does? What if for these moments he’s loving me, I didn’t counter him with all the reasons why I was unlovable?

What would it be like to believe him?

To believe that this deficient body was beautiful, was worthy, was capable of more than misery and pain?

What would it feel like to accept its limitations? Its failures? Its pain and its faults?

To accept those things and still somehow find the good?

John kissed me deeply, our bodies pressed together, and he touched me, drawing his hands over me in slow arcs, across my back and over my shoulders, running down my thigh and gripping my arse. My skin warmed beneath him, blood rising up to the surface to bloom against his palms.

“You’re gorgeous like this,” John murmured, his tongue curling around my ear, his hand tangled in my hair. “I love how responsive you are. It’s so fucking hot.”

John was hard, the feverish crown of his cock a brand against my thigh, leaving sticky kisses behind.

My body had done that.

This broken, precious body had done that.

“Sherlock,” he gasped, as I closed my hand around him. Maybe John was feeling the way that pleasure could be a keen edge, a cutting edge, a razor, a knife.

I stroked him and he trembled, his forehead pressed hard to my cheek, watching me touch him. I could feel the warm rush of his breath on my lips and I turned to capture his mouth with my own. He moaned and thrust his tongue inside, trembling harder against me.

“Stop, stop,” he panted, pushing my hand away a few minutes later. “Not yet. We’re not in any hurry.”

I wasn’t even hard yet; the medicine sometimes could take an hour to take effect. I checked the clock. We were forty-five minutes in.

John rolled over onto his back, smiling up at me, flushed. The smell of his soap rose up and tickled my nose, making my skin hot and tingly. “That was really fucking close.”

I have related to you many of the John Watsons I adore, however this one might be my favourite. Sprawled on his back, confident and happy and louche, with his limbs splayed out at different angles, covered from chest to cheeks in a rosy sex blush, his fingers toying with the hair curling just above his left nipple. Grinning like mad at me, midnight blue eyes shining, with his cock standing up proud and thick against his belly.

I’d had the distinct honour of bearing witness to how his body had changed over the years, watched it grow firmer and softer in places, through seasons of vigour and injury and repose. I’d watched the lines on his face run deeper, the silver in his hair grow brighter, the scars that he carries grow fainter. I loved his body dearly, it was beloved to me as nothing else because it housed his mind and heart and soul. I repeat myself, again and again, however it strikes me anew, the force of the affection and admiration I hold for him, each time I am with him.

So when he broke out in goosebumps a moment later I quickly climbed over him to fetch our quilt from where I had pushed it off the bed. I turned to drape it over him but he had shifted when I moved. His head was just tilted off the lip of the mattress and he was looking up at me upside down, curving one hand around my thigh and tugging me forward. I shuffled closer, sliding my soles along the hardwood. John’s mouth was just level with my soft cock, my bollocks just brushing the bridge of his nose. John’s hand on the back of my thigh exerted subtle pressure and I leaned my knees into the mattress, bracketing John’s head, and watched as he licked out with his tongue and drew it around the folds of my foreskin.

I nearly lost my balance as the sharp sensation returned suddenly, lancing through me, sheer and heady. It very nearly buckled my knees. John reached up his hand and I steadied myself, unable to tear my eyes away from where he was kissing the tip of my sheathed cock. Returning his hands to the backs of my thighs he swayed me forward so that he could take me inside his mouth. I groaned, my eyes rolling back in my head at the warm wet suction. John released me after a few brief moments, returning once more to gently kissing and licking.

It was one of the most sensual acts to ever have been visited on my person. He was content just to taste me, to caress me and suckle me. I could be embarrassed by it, but I was trying it out, you see, imagining myself through John’s eyes.

This body beloved.

Just as his was to me.

The blade was gone. Desire swelled through me, languid and lapping, matching the pace of John’s tender coaxing. It swirled and eddied, a rising tide of heat and pleasure.

I let it suffuse me. Let the waves wash through me, awakening sensations lain dormant, but not gone.

I began to stiffen, the crown of my cock just pushing out to be met by the slick glide of John’s tongue. He moaned, his eyes sliding closed as he took the plump head between his lips and sucked softly at it.

Christ.

It was exquisite. 

He tucked his tongue inside the rim of my foreskin and ran it around, causing it to retract further and my cock to lengthen and thicken. It hung heavy and full over John’s reddened mouth, the weight of it dragging across his bottom lip. My heart crashed down to beat in my navel at the sight, blood rushing towards my lower extremities, and I felt dizzy, my pulse pounding. He teased the tip of his tongue against my sensitive slit as the dark plummy head was fully revealed, and as I watched, a bead of precome pearled on the pink bed of his tongue.

“John,” I gasped, hoarse, my mouth gone dry. I leaned harder into the bed, needing support.

He continued in the same fashion for I don’t know how long, tracing the veins that began to grow rigid along the dorsal side of my cock and paying devotion to the vee of my frenulum with firm pressure. At last I reached full hardness and I had to feed my cock to him, guiding it into the tight, hot circle of his lips as he began to take me deeper into his mouth. All the while the tide continued to rise, until I was brimming, and dangerously close to running over.

“I’m close,” I whispered, unable to keep from thrusting. John simply squeezed the back of my thighs and opened his throat to me, swallowing me down. I came inside him in a hot, mind-splintering rush, my movements erratic and clumsy, my hips stuttering, overcome by how bloody good it felt, and I finished, spilling on his tongue and lips.

I fell to my knees, unable to hold my weight any longer, and kissed him, upside down as he was, tasting the musky bitterness of my come.

**********

I pause here. I have written out the rest of our interlude in minute, succulent detail twice now and twice I have torn the pages from this book. I have sat here for four hours staring out the window wondering why. And then a little further down that path, the question changed to: why on earth was I writing this in the first place? I leafed through the pages and blushed at the intimacy of what I had produced. John’s pages outshone my own, which was no surprise, he has a knack for romantic melodrama, a firm grasp of plot, and a pretty turn of phrase, but, again, what was the exercise meant to amount to? Titillating pornography? An ageing man’s attempt to put down some of his life for posterity? But what posterity? No one save John would ever set eyes on this drivel.

And yet.

And yet I returned to this notebook regularly.

There must be a point surely. But the harder I wracked my brain, the more apparent it was that I didn’t have a clear reason for writing and if there was no reason then why was it worthwhile?

Outside, night had fallen while I had been preoccupied with my brooding. Agitated, I picked up the notebook and took it downstairs with me, intending to put it into the fire.

John was in the sitting room reading, socked feet sticking out from under an afghan, a cold cup of tea balanced on the armrest beside him, his reading glasses perched low on his nose. They were tortoiseshell and he looked positively devastating in them, but I had other things on my mind just then and so I ignored the urge to have him there on the sofa, and went to crouch before our empty hearth.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

“Making a fire,” I answered.

“What’s that you’ve got there?” The blanket rustled as he sat up and tried to peer over my shoulder to see what was in my hand.

“Just a bit of kindling,” I said, trying to keep my voice bored and flat so that he would desist and return to his book.

“Isn’t that your journal?”

Bugger.

I shrugged, the picture of nonchalance. “So it is.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to burn it!” he exclaimed, his feet hitting the floor with a mild thump. Toby considered us from his place curled up on my armchair, ears perked.

“I don’t have need of it anymore,” I said, ripping out a sheaf of blank pages from the back and beginning to crush them between my palms before lining the bottom of the grate with them.

“Sherlock Holmes.” His hand circled my wrist. I hadn’t heard him move.

“What?” I said, the backs of my eyes and throat hot. I found I could not meet his eye.

“You cannot burn it. I will not let you.”

“You’re being very dramatic. It’s not even any good.”

“Not any good!” he echoed, as if shocked by this assertion of the state of things. “That’s not true, but even if it were why does it have to be good for you to want to keep it?”

“It was a silly pastime that saw me through a long winter and I don’t need it anymore,” I said, digging in my heels.

“But you were just writing in it for the last week. You were trying to hide it under that great encyclopaedia about bees you checked out from the library, but really you can’t hide it from me. I know the signs, you must realise.”

“The signs?”

“The indentation on your middle finger from where you’ve been holding the pen,” he said, smugly. “That thesaurus you keep rifling through over breakfast. The side of your hand ink-stained from where you rested it on the page while the ink was still wet.” He lifted my hand to reveal the traitorous evidence.

“So what?” I said, defiantly.

“Dearest, why do you want to burn it?” His question was quite earnest and so I allowed myself to sink down onto my backside, holding the book in my lap.

I gave him the facts. “It’s a ridiculous thing for a grown man to be doing.”

“I contend that it’s not. We’re retired, we’ve loads more time than we ever had before. Why, I’ve taken up with that book club even though I’ve hated every book they’ve chosen so far,” he said, lowering himself to the floor beside me.

“You enjoy their company,” I chided. “And a chance to drink at the pub.”

John nodded. “Exactly. There’s no purpose to it. I just enjoy it. I think you’ve enjoyed writing, yes?”

I couldn’t quite own it, but I swallowed down the impulse to deny it and nodded.

“So then why give it up?”

“Because it’s not…” I held up my hands in frustration. “It’s not advancing the cause of anything! It’s not productive, it’s not…”

“And why must a hobby be productive? Isn’t the joy of it enough?”

He obviously didn’t understand and he was muddying the waters. I had decided to give it up and that was that.

“Fine,” I conceded, “I won’t burn it. You can have it. It’s basically an erotic ode to you and how much I love you anyway.” I thrust it at him.

He laughed and shook his head at me as if I were thick.

“That’s not what it is.” His eyes fairly twinkled at me.

I huffed, taking it as condescension. “Then what, pray tell, is it?”

“Proof,” he said, enigmatically.

“Proof of what?”

“Proof that _I_ love _you_.”

“Nonsense,” I said, automatically, my heart racing a bit.

“It’s not.”

“Explain.”

He scooted closer to me until our knees were touching and he could cup my face. Sometimes the blue of his eyes is unbearable. It makes my heart do funny things.

“You don’t believe me when I say it,” he said.

“I—“ I began to protest but he shook his head again.

“You don’t. You believe me when I touch you. When I show you. When I make you _feel_ it.”

I opened my mouth.

But there was nothing for it.

I closed my eyes.

He was right.

“You wrote it down because when you read it, you relive that feeling of being loved by me, and you believe it, if only for a little while.”

“That’s very perspicacious of you, John,” I said, my throat raspy as I was very, very close to tears.

“You think I don’t know what that word means and that I’m going to get distracted from the emotional reaction you’re having over there, but it won’t work. Need I remind you again that I was the original writer in the family? I might not know a wit about bees or ash or chemistry, but words, words I know.” John kissed me sweetly on both of my hot cheeks and then dropped his hands from my face and picked up the notebook, leafing through it to the beginning of the most recent chapter I had written. He scanned it, his mouth twitching as he remembered the events laid out within.

“You left it there!?” he cried out in mock dismay when he had come to the end.

“In my defence, I was interrupted by an existential crisis,” I explained. “But I suppose if you were to give me something new to write about… If you were to, say, make me feel loved, well, then it might make a proper ending to this chapter.”

It ended up that I did have him on the sofa after all. And him clad in nothing but his tortoiseshell frames. It was, in a word, superb.

And so I will well and truly leave it there. As it was in the beginning when I began this whole endeavour so it is still. I love John Watson and it bears repeating. I love him in the morning and in the evening, on ordinary Wednesdays, on Mondays, on Sundays, and every day in between. I met him and loved him and married him two weeks later. He is my rock and my home.

He is quite simply everything I cannot do without in this world.

And I am just beginning to believe that I could possibly, somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, be of the same incomparable value to him.

(We will see if this still holds true in a week when I inform him that we will have bees come May.)

**Author's Note:**

> This series is now complete! I loved writing this weird modern day AU dearly so thank you to anyone who followed me down this strange path. I'd love to know what you think if you're so inclined, but all my thanks for being here all the same <3 <3 <3


End file.
